Unnamed Journal 13 and A Callback to a Mad Emperor

This first of our quarterly issues contains a whole mess of cool jazz, which you don’t need me to tell you about, because it’s right there on the cover. But I will say that The Meditations of Caius Caligulia is an idea I’ve been batting around for a little while, as a counter-point to the tale of I, Claudius. In fact, I blogged about that a while ago:

I’m interested chiefly in the widely-reported notion that Caligulia believed himself a god. The Roman Empire was a time of great religious flux, as the old Republican pantheon gave way to thrilling cults from the East: Isis, Mithraism, Manichaeanism, Gnosticism, and Christianity. So I’d like to shift this most notorious emperor from Crazy to Self-Deifying.

And that’s precisely the tack I’ve taken with him. Camus’ play worked off the idea that a man that young holding power that absolute would have required god-tier self-control not to think himself divine. I run with that to the notion that for Caligulia, believing himself a god made much more sense than the lunatic Game of Thrones that was the Julio-Claudian dynasty. This is of course, only a second chapter; the first was in the last issue of UJ. When I’ve written them all, I’ll turn them into a book.